Oona A. Hathaway is a nonresident scholar in the Global Order and Institutions Program at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. She is also Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, professor of international law and area studies at the Yale University MacMillan Center, professor of the Yale University department of political science, and director of the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges. Her current research focuses on the future of the global legal order, accountability for the Russia-Ukraine war, the role of the United Nations and possibility of reform at the United Nations, and how to think about sovereignty in cyber operations. Her research also focuses on foreign relations topics, including U.S. war powers and the law governing how the United States makes its international agreements.
An expert in international law, national security law, and foreign relations law, Oona is the author of more than forty law review articles, and The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (with Scott Shapiro, 2017). She is also executive editor of and a regular author at Just Security, and she writes often for publications such as the Washington Post, New York Times, the Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs.
In 2014-15, Oona took leave to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. She has been a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the United States Department of State since 2005. She is the director of the annual Yale Cyber Leadership Forum and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and she is a reporter for the Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law. Her full CV can be found here.
The international system empowers every nation to act independently: to enforce the rules, or to ignore them. The future of the global order—and everything it has delivered to the world—depends on what they decide.
The policy makes some procedural improvements, but overall it’s a missed opportunity.
Addressing the problem of impunity requires addressing not just the absence of criminal accountability for the clearly unlawful acts of the president in the United States but also the long-standing absence of accountability for the clearly unlawful acts of the president and the government the president leads around the globe.
Nonamendment reform can enable the body to meet the challenges of the moment when the Security Council is paralyzed by the veto.
The UN Security Council’s paralysis amid the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict has deepened skepticism about the body’s capacity to advance collective security and promote the rule of law.
If the United States and Israel truly believe there is no legal basis for the charges by the International Criminal Court, they should call the ICC prosecutor’s bluff. Israel should launch a genuine investigation of its own.
An examination of the history of the laws of war, which are clearly failing non-combatants as responses to terror attacks like October 7 and 9/11 that target civilians end up costing the lives of many more civilians since as many as a million died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If the law of war is to survive today’s existential challenges, the United States and its allies need to treat it not as an optional constraint to be adjusted or shrugged off as needed but as an unmoving pillar of the global legal order.
Who pays for the terrible destruction wrought by war? Throughout history, reparations following interstate conflict have proven troublingly elusive for most victim States.
Ukraine has made international law a centerpiece of its war effort ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. It came as something of a shock, then, to see the International Court of Justice deal Ukraine’s legal effort two blows in a pair of disappointing decisions last week.
